Integrative Analysis on Histopathological Image for Identifying Cellular Heterogeneity.

Abstract

This study has brought together image processing, clustering and spatial pattern analysis to quantitatively analyze hematoxylin and eosin-stained (H&E) tissue sections. A mixture of tumor and normal cells (intratumoral heterogeneity) as well as complex tissue architectures of most samples complicate the interpretation of their cytological profiles. To address these challenges, we develop a simple but effective methodology for quantitative analysis for H&E section. We adopt comparative analyses of spatial point patterns to characterize spatial distribution of different nuclei types and complement cellular characteristics analysis. We demonstrate that tumor and normal cell regions exhibit significant differences of lymphocytes spatial distribution or lymphocyte infiltration pattern.